Listening to Our Bodies

Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together--and they call the result intuition.

-Agatha Christie

From "Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom," by Christiane Northrup, M.D.:

I believe that modern medical preference for drugs and surgery as treatments is part of the aggressive patriarchal or addictive approach to disease. That which is natural and nontoxic is seen as inferior to the "big guns" of drugs, chemotherapy, and radiation. Drug-free, natural methods of treatment with well-studied, well-documented benefits, such as therapeutic touch, are ignored. Treatments that offer complementary care are denigrated. Studies that demonstrate their worth are ignored as well. A classic example of a disregarded study-and there are many-is one on the effects of prayer. This study was truly double-blind: Neither the doctors, the nurses, nor the patients knew who was being prayed for. But the patients in a coronary intensive care unit who were prayed for, by a group who didn't know who they were praying for, were far less likely to go into heart failure, need cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), need artificial breathing (endotracheal intubation), develop infection or pneumonia, or require diuretics than the patients in the unit who were not prayed for.

If a drug had shown an effect this striking, it would be considered unethical not to use it. Given these benefits and the total absence of side effects of prayer, a true scientist would be fascinated with this data and want to study the effects even further. Yet when Dr. Bernie Siegel posted this paper on the bulletin board in the doctors' lounge of his hospital, within a few hours, a colleague had written "Bull....!" across the front page!

The addictive system considers the body to be subordinate to the brain and its dictates of reason. It often teaches us to ignore fatigue, hunger, discomfort, or our need for caring and nurturing. It conditions us to see the body as an adversary, particularly when the body is giving us messages that we don't want to hear. The culture often tries to kill the body-as-messenger along with its message. Yet our own body is the best health system we have-if we know how to listen to it.